Master bath + more

Consider yourself forewarned...I didn't post much last week, so this one is going to be long!

The master bath has been a huge focus this week — here's what's gone down:

Monday – shower being framed

Other wall still raw

Tuesday – can lights in

Long debate (long story short) on shower niche ends — there are two going in a new short wall to the right of the ladder. Other walls won't work for various reasons, so a brilliant thought by my dad for this new wall, this way the niches won't show when walking in the room.

Wednesday – wonderboard goes up, ready for tile

Drywall on other walls

Thursday – drywall is patched. Still a gap left open for duct work between the two bathrooms, which happened Friday. Which brings us to...

Friday – all closed in!

The right side of the bathroom isn't really reflected much here but that's where the double vanities will go. And tile is delivering Monday, so this will really take shape next week!

Plan for tile:

Pebble shower floor, light wood vanity, marble vanity top, and 12x24 shiny white gloss tile everywhere else in the room. And one black and white cat (just kidding)

The white gloss tile, while likely the least impressive to most, was extremely important to us to get right. We didn't want your standard old porcelain tiles, and we wanted them bright white, not off white, and shiny, just like the Dixie Chick girl's bathroom we are stalking. I can't figure out why this was so hard to find b/c it's so basic, but this took, oh, about 30-odd vendors' worth of searching and we finally found it from Porcelanosa. Safe to say, a longer journey than one might think!

The other major news was the paint. May not be impressive in pictures but I almost cried in person when I saw something "new" and "done"....sigh....

Den, ceiling only of course so far

Living Room

Kitchen, left side only painted b/c cabinets go on the right side

And last but not least, the niche in the guest bath is finished off and has a great little stainless light that will shine down nicely on it's future glass shelving.

 The den is also finally getting some love — the plan is to paint this the White Dove, with contrasting bookshelf backwall color. Molding is being replaced inside the bookshelves and around the room to be less traditional, more flat and contemporary, and the veneer walls are being repaired where needed. New doors for the bookshelves are also being built by our cabinet maker.

The bookshelves themselves are also getting thickened up for more impact—the bookshelf on the left of the fireplace here has the new thick shelf look, compared to shelf to the right of the fireplace for how it was before. (Fireplace wall itself is being prepped for the TV if you're wondering).

And Saturday was the day of.....10,000 bulbs.

Backstory: We have a lot of mondo grass (mini monkey-grass) in our yard. Unfortunately it wasn't in the places we wanted. We decided to blanket the whole declined area of the front yard in it to provide ground cover – basically so we didn't have to mow on the incline. So it had to be moved.

We used this piece-of-crap bulber from Lowe's to remove the mondo grass from elsewhere in the yard...and start to plant it in rows right above the brick wall.. Mike here as Master Bulber, smiling b/c it was early on in the project!

By 10 am it was going verrrry slowly even with 3 of us working on it. Do you see my one pathetic row there in green sprouts? While Mike was de-bulbing, my mom and I were carving new holes and planting the rows. We went through the 2 mini-sized bulbers from Lowe's pretty quickly till our neighbor Bill came and saved us with his full-size bulber.

Then my mom had the idea to bring out the power auger to drill the holes for replanting. That sped things along — my dad loves a good yard project, so it wasn't long before he ditched the den bookshelves and came out to drill. By the end of the day, we got at least 250-odd bulbs planted and covered one side of the yard.

We are super-tired out and sore but happy with our work. Too bad there is another whole side for next Saturday, ha!